


A True War Story

by mayakovsky



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:02:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayakovsky/pseuds/mayakovsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim understands when she says she joined the army because she needed to feel something die. She can't burn cities, can't pull the beams out of lives the way Jim does, but she can dirty her hands. She can smell the blood and not gag and she doesn't mind the mess the way Jim does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A True War Story

**Author's Note:**

> “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross that river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow.”  
> \- Tim O'Brien

Seb's knees are grinding in to concrete and there's a hot pipe pressed to her hip, jutting out and up like a maze lain out for the sky above them to follow. She can't feel the burn of her elbow torn by loose grit and in the morning, she'll have a pearl white line on her thigh where the skin has been scalded smooth by one of the water pipes, but none of it matters. Her scope isn't trained on the window of the flat she's watching, but she's watching it all the same, one eye squeezed shut and the other narrowed. Dangling from her lips is a rolled cigarette, crooked and wrinkled and a tuft of tobacco peeks out from the tip, catching the lick of flame from her match as easy as gasoline.

She won't be killing tonight, but the feeling thrums through her all the same, the calm of a Scottish lake at night breathing in to her.

 

 

Never once has she thought to be jealous of Sherlock Holmes. Not in all the time that Jim's eye glinted at the idea, the raw and unrestrained joy he holds against his chest like a mother would a child - like Seb would her military rifle, so many years ago.

It's some twisted and bastardized version of _he dances with her and comes home to me_ that she takes comfort in without realizing it but, training her scope and then scraping her hips across the top of her roof to get a better angle, it can be traced to a point in time when Jim threw her favorite rolling papers on the table and then himself in to the chair beside it, sneering.

"I steal your cigarettes, you didn't have to get me those." Seb has her Browning held with both knees together, greasing and wiping, greasing and wiping, the slow and methodical manner in which she does everything, the respect and reverence for the weapon she holds.

"I'm sick of you stealing my cigarettes," Jim snaps back, but his mouth is contorted and twisted in to what Seb had come to learn as a smile.

"You don't even smoke."

"It's the illusion, dear."

 

 

Seb lets herself be dressed in sleek black ensembles and will twirl when Jim takes her hand and tells her to; it becomes a game for him to choose her dresses and see where she could hide a gun. One night they're married, the next they're getting a divorce. The week after, they're tired parents glad to have a night out, and then at breakfast the next day she calls him "brother dear" and he smirks, dragging a fork along her thigh. One night, she waits until the ballroom ladies toilet is full before she chokes out a story about his abusive ways to explain the bruise on her cheekbone from a Russian who thought he could hit her and get away with all his fingers.

Jim understands when she says she joined the army because she needed to feel something die. She can't burn cities, can't pull the beams out of lives the way Jim does, but she can dirty her hands. She can smell the blood and not gag and she doesn't mind the mess the way Jim does. He laughs and labels them the brain and the brawn as she wraps split knuckles and touches his split lip with a ball of cotton. If she's at all gentle in the motion, she erases the memory of it later when she slams him in to the bed; he cracks her wrist when he pins it behind her back and throws her against the wall.

 

 

For her birthday, she's shot at and Jim kisses her in greeting as she takes the steps to MoMA two at a time; he hovers near a Dali display.

"Do you like my present?" he grins, voice doing that curious flip flop like a happy child, and it makes Seb smile.

"American?"

"Just for you," and a Beretta 92 is pressed in to her hand, a cheeky red bow tied around the barrel.

At dinner that night, Jim throws her down a flight of stairs in front of a crowd that believes her to be pregnant. They're gone before the police are even called, and her dress is torn to shreds and covered in blood. Instead of turning on the heat, Jim touches a lighter to it and tosses it in the basin sink. They wake on the floor and the side of their oven is charred black.

He's in Siberia for a month and Seb is so bored that she slices off her hair again, as short as it had been in the army, and shows too much skin at a pub, luring a man three times her size in to the alley so she can fist fight with him. Jim smiles when he sees her bruised eye and bleeding gums, and she would smile back if it didn't ache. Her bruises are his welcome home gift, her way of a running jump at the airport, kisses and an embrace and all the things they had never done and would never do - a running jump to pin the other to the bed, perhaps, a kiss before a slap across the cheek, a tight embrace with one arm pressed against a windpipe. They're thrown from a club for public drunkenness that night, and walk home completely sober with the facade of lost control shed on the ground behind them.

 

 

"What was it, that delightful little thing they taught you to say?" Jim asks one morning, lining up her bullets on the counter like morbid dominoes.

"They, whoever they are, taught me to say a lot of things."

"The army, dear, don't be so purposefully _obtuse_."

"Sometimes I am obtuse, you know." Jim hisses at her through his teeth and flicks a finger forward; a cascade of bullets hit the ground like soft rainfall.

"I must master my rifle as I must master my life. Without my rifle, I am useless."

"That's right."

"That one isn't us. Americans."

"I like it better." Jim's hands ghost over the few bullets that haven't hit the ground, then down to hover over Seb's head where she's kneeled to pick them up. He grabs at a tuft of jagged hair, cut with a razor in the bathroom rather than the modest barber she'd seen the day before she had left to train, ten inches of sponge cake blonde hair swept across the floor. "Without my rifle, I am nothing."

It's fucking poetic, and Seb lets the barrel of her rifle drop with a grunt, rolling on to her back on the roof and relishing the crack of her spine readjusting from a position held so long. She's the gun in his hands, scope always trained, it's sickeningly perfect. It isn't the man that kills the wife, it's the gun, and Jim never has to dirty his hands. Her blood is the only kind he picks from under his finger nails after she punches him at an opera house, after they scream on the London Eye with Australian accents and make the rest of the pod uncomfortable. When he shoves her off a walled walk-way and in to the Thames.

She takes great pride in how hard he has to scrub to smear rust colored stains out of his shirts, his lighter ties, their sheets, and on the last night, they bundle all their clothes, their bedsheets, the black rug she had insisted on because sometimes things got nasty at their flat - they burn everything. She finds her missing tooth from Christmas under the bed.

Her blunt nails drag at the too-hot patch of skin under her black slacks where she'd laid against a water pipe, agitating it. There are bound to be streaks of cherry red through the burn in the morning, and it's what she aims for. She irritates her burnt skin for Jim, in a cell at Scotland Yard with the force's most incompetent but trigger happy guarding the door.

He tells her to run as they watch their flat catch fire, the flat rented to a Jim Masters, employed at St. Bartholemew's until a month ago. In the morning, the police discover Jim Masters died three years prior.

She scrapes a second match across the edge of the roof and the flame isn't nearly large enough, but if she squeezes one eye shut and focuses the other as if through a scope, it looks as if the skyline is on fire, brilliant and blazing and everything Jim Moriarty had promised her when he'd knocked on the door of the empty flat she was staked out in, years and years ago.

 

 

"Without my rifle, I am useless," Jim smirks across the street from parliament, waiting for a glimpse of Mycroft Holmes, hands tucked deep in to his suit - three thousand pounds, and yet they had stolen a meal the night before, a stupid delivery boy who was too caught up in the image of a crying woman with a bruise across her neck. He'd never have guessed that she gave its creator a much worse one.

 

 

Seb smiles, the wood of the wasted match now ash and flame against her finger tips without so much as a hiss from her mouth.

She isn't going to kill Sherlock Holmes tonight, because a bullet through a pane of glass, as tiny and perfectly round as an air bubble in the molten creation of it - that would be too easy. Jim would throw her down the stairs with the intent to hurt if she took Sherlock away from him. Washing a child's favorite tattered bear, or something to the effect. She isn't as smart or as cunning, but she reminds Jim time and time again while bruises yellow on both of their skin, that rifles kill men quicker than intelligence.

"Clearly you don't know Sherlock Holmes."


End file.
